This work, along with Tassaert's Painting and Sculpture, was one of four representations of the arts and sciences commissioned by Louis XV's finance minister, Abbé Terray.

It was Clodion who arranged for the expensive Carrara marble used for
all of Terray's statues, urging his source not to divulge the name of his
unpopular client. Clodion had lived in Italy for nine years after winning
the Prix de Rome. A vision of antiquity he acquired while in Italy — a
wooded Arcadia where young satyrs and nymphs cavort — continued to be his
greatest inspiration. After his return to Paris, these subjects delighted
the aristocratic and wealthy bourgeois clients who flooded him with
commissions to decorate their homes.

Clodion prepared a terracotta model for Poetry and Music, which
is in the National Gallery and frequently on view in the ground-floor
sculpture galleries. It provides a rare chance to compare an artist's model
with the final version in stone. In this case, Clodion modified the figure
of poetry, "correcting" it to adhere to traditional representations: the
terracotta figure had rested his head in his hand, but here he holds a
writing stylus.